What baffles me, isn't just that people don't see the low quality writing themselves, but that they must also be able to identify other's shit "LLM writings" right? And realize how what they put out sounds exactly the same? Or did people completely stop reading what they've "wrote" before hitting that magical submit button?
Yeah I don't quite understand it either. Where's the intersection between people producing AI slop and people that have never read AI slop? I guess it's bigger than we thought... Or maybe they just don't give a shit. That's probably it.
I suspect people who are putting out LLM "writing" are people who weren't trying to communicate in the first place.
They were likely hunting for a better job, chasing the thrill of a million views, or similar - seeking a side effect of writing, rather than seeking to help someone else understand what was in their head.
It blows my mind. A customer of ours, whom I respect the technical opinion of, drops fully unedited Claude posts on LinkedIn now. I don't get how he thinks they read like anything but slop.
if they had been half decent at writing before they would notice the quality issue, not being able to see it is also a writing skill issue, now it's just kind of spammy as people are just reaching for the tool in ai nighsosis
People like this generally don't read, for pleasure or edification. Their posts are advertising, designed to work by repetition. They're not necessarily looking to persuade smart people; they're going after the same sort of people who want to fix problems with this one weird trick (doctors hate him!).
> isn't just that people don't see the low quality writing themselves, but that they must also be able to identify other's shit "LLM writings" right?
This style emerged from a large number of people explicitly preferring it over alternatives when offering feedback. There is genuinely no accounting for taste (and if there were, many people would be in crippling debt).
Interesting question for sure, but for now the writing is just bad. So people might not know it's LLM prose, they just notice its poorly written and engage with the ideas less
I was fired from my job at spotify for taking fmla when i my dad was dying from cancer. I've been marking the my directors posts on linkedin as 'looks like ai slop'.
I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing."
My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?
Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus, I tend to think that the "real" reason most of us don't like it when people use LLMs to write without disclosure is that it's misleading: It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't.
(The em dashes in this message were rendered using keyboard shortcuts.)
Some people type 100x more words than the final article just digging into a topic and turning it on all sides. The final article being generated tells you nothing of the size of the effort going in.
I think, there's a systematic flaw in RLHF: constructs reinforced as effective or sophisticated style will always suffer overuse and significant overexposure. Which will be also very obvious when used out of the intended context, it's copied from. There will be always a "smell", something that causes us to turn our backs to these texts, and possible the supposed authors, as well.
There's also the problem that certain types of phrasing are perceived as effective, because they mark a pivotal point in the progress of the text and are, as such, used sparingly, but are now becoming everyday templates that incorporate whatever is available in the context. There is no way this passes the Turing test of a competent reader.
And there's yet another issue: in social research, there has been the concept of semantic position, indicated by deviation from the mean (or median). If you don't deviate from the mean, your semantic position is zero. There's simply no expression. In this sense, next token prediction really amounts to a desemantificiation of the context. There's really no sense in uttering any of these productions, no plausible motivation, other than for the purpose of raising you hand to be seen.
> If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?
I would say it is certainly significantly more ok. There are two reasons reading AI-generated text sucks now:
1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself.
2. The prose style is horrible to read.
If we eliminate the second reason then it's definitely an improvement. (Although on the other hand the terrible prose can be quite a helpful indication that you're wasting your time reading slop, so maybe we shouldn't complain about it!)
> 1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself.
You have no way of knowing what the input to the writing was. You're making the erroneous assumption that the person posting the article was a mouthbreathing spammer who used the prompt "write me an article on subject XYZ, make no mistakes!" and you could have supplied the same prompt.
1. Facts and processes. I just want to know something. I do not care if some Nerds for Nginx article is AI written.
2. Opinions and experiences. I want to know a human is writing because emotionally engaging with an AI isn’t building a stronger society - it’s increasing isolation.
3.
In another front, I feel like the value of an AI story cannot be greater than the value of the inputs. If you wrote a two paragraph prompt and an LLM produced a 10 page story, the truth is, it’s only worth two paragraphs. That’s just a feeling, but as of now I don’t think the LLMs have any additional life experiences to draw on to increase the value of their storytelling. (I understand this is debatable, but still- what they offer is available to everyone for now; it is a baseline.)
Yeah that's the point. Spammers have an infinite desire to make more spam, so most statistically most LLM writing is garbage.
Readers are making this connection from their own experience. All these tells just to associate it with with garbage.
In the before times, sending a formal document full of typos and errors would show you didn't bother to proofread, now having a doc full of lazy "LLMisms" also looks like you were too lazy to proofread.
> You're making the erroneous assumption that the person posting the article was a mouthbreathing spammer
Yes, that's the risk of using an LLM to "clean up" your writing. It's human nature to think you're unique and everyone else should somehow instinctively realize your output is unlike all the LLM spam garbage and worth their time but that doesn't work in practice.
It's unreasonable to expect other people to suppress their intuitive heuristics formed from the bait and switch of being subjected to endless LLM spam every day and blame them for not giving you a fair chance.
I wonder why people think posting undisclosed LLM writing is any better than uncited posting of some other person’s writing. Even if original author is okay with it, it’s still misleading and dishonest.
It's because they view the LLM's output as "their thoughts." They told the LLM (via the prompt) what to do—often with loads of run-on sentences and long trains-of-thought. From their perspective, the LLM is just acting as a translation tool, saving them the trouble of having to think (about grammar, ideal wording, or even the order in which their thoughts should be presented).
They treat it as "just another tool" to improve efficiency. Like using a drill instead of a screwdriver.
Then there's people who are so lazy they give LLMs instructions like, "write a LinkedIn post about how AI is changing the future of work for thumbnail consultants." That's when it moves from "translating your thoughts" to "writing for you."
I think the issue is that it can be hard to tell the difference. We need better terms for these things so we can differentiate use cases.
And it doesn't foreclose the possibility of LLM achieving human-like writing ability. If I stole the writing of a human author much better than me it would still be plagiarism.
Of course, with real books we do have the problem of ghostwriting, where an author willingly writes for a book that will be published under someone else's authorship. That may be where things end up here, with requirements to acknowledge sources, whether ghostwritten for you or written by others.
I suppose using LLMs to write is like not wiping your ass, and using LLMs that are bad at writing is like not wiping your ass and wearing a T-shirt that says "Wiping is for losers."
I might have smelled something suspicious before, but knowing for sure is worse.
This misunderstands what it means to be better at writing. Root cause here is that writing is how humans communicate ideas. An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article. Even if the writing gets better, it will still be necessarily empty when expending anything that isn’t completely specified.
LLMs seem already to be pretty good at translating, where you already have something fully written and are changing the language. It’s when they get rough ideas and fill in the gaps you get the empty prose they are known for.
> An LLM written thing isn’t doing that, it’s something equivalent to copy/pasting a Wikipedia article.
Nonsense. I’m not sure whether this was ever an appropriate description of what LLMs do, but either way, they have obviously moved way, way beyond that.
Absolutely agree. A modern agent is a sophisticated tool that can link multiple sources together to create a coherent piece of information hyper-specified for an audience. However, if humans have outlines that are expandable by LLMs it makes the most sense to do that as late as possible.
I don’t like reading AI writing either but I’m sure that’s a transitory period. Single prompt text expansions are unlikely to be useful because they’re late-bindable. You could give the original to me and I might be able to understand better.
But a series of steering prompts with various sources brought in is a different story. At that point it’s just a question of whether the agent can put together good information and their current inability to do so is unlikely to mean an inherent problem.
Some kind of UI affordance for this might help: with the agent emitting tags that allow for auto-folding or expansion in a way that allows both concise text and exposition when required by the reader. Mechanical sympathy, but for code executing on a human: good old human sympathy if you will
> Root cause here is that writing is how humans communicate ideas.
Writing is a way humans communicate ideas. It's not the only way humans communicate ideas. And now, it's not only humans who communicate ideas, we just saw with the OpenAI HuggingFace hack how AI agents were able to communicate amongst themselves by using various hacked websites to opportunistically write notes for later agents to use.
All that "X is a thing only humans do" type of circular definitions will buy you, is to expand the definition of what humanity is. And I doubt that's really what you think.
I think you're missing the context, which isn't musing on what it is to be human and can machines think, but the purpose of Joe Smith's LinkedIn account expressing that he has ideas about X is to convey the message that Joe Smith is interested enough in X to venture an opinion on it, and Joe Smith has actually just set up an automated process to generate content without thinking about X, that perverts the purpose of communicating that Joe Smith is interested enough in X to propose the following ideas he been thinking about...
Similarly if Joe's contribution to his long form "idea" is a couple of bullet points, a programme trained on flowery phrasing and a weighted average of everyone else's ideas isn't communicating Joe's thoughts on the topic, it's just adding words.
The debate on whether Claude actually thinks or not is orthogonal to the fact that outsourcing your "thought leadership" to it is avoiding thinking or leading. If I want to know how Wikipedia or Claude summarise wider human thought about the topic, I can find their websites thanks
I get the context, but then the comment I'd replied to would have said that humans get better at communicating their ideas by writing their ideas on their own, rather than that writing is some kind of human-only mode of exposition. It's not.
And nor is an LLM generating text just "copy/pasting a Wikipedia article", you'd think people on HN would be smarter than that at least.
If all Joe Smith is going to do is cat $(which claude) to his LinkedIn, then he'll deserve the poor results he gets from it, but we shouldn't mistakenly say that this will be because LLMs simply cannot write. It would be just as dumb for Joe Smith to do with with a professional human ghostwriter.
People shouldn’t pass off largely unedited AI writing as their own, but I’d much rather live in a world where that writing would be of high quality in both form and content, than in the world we live now. In that sense, lack of disclosure is the lesser evil.
When I can get an LLM to write like Isaac Asimov, I'll consider some artificial literary experiments; there were books I wanted him to have written that he did not get around to, quitting at 458.
> If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?
If LLM writing improves to the point where they can infer the business (or other real world) context and serves the functional purpose of informing others as opposed to being an intellectually lazy piece being produced only for the purpose of being produced, then I’d be fine. It’s likely the author would need to spend some effort on the said piece of writing.
Someone's actual writing (or talking) is a rich stream of information about who they are, their motives, their preferences, modes of persuasion, and so much more. Undetectable LLM writing essentially allows someone to assume another person's identity. That is not good for anyone except the person trying to pull off a "scam" of some sort, in the broadest sense of that term. It's bad for everyone else, and for society at large.
I agree. LLM writing is atrocious, but people also want LLM writing to be atrocious in many cases, because they don’t like LLMs.
The worst of this is with image/video AI models, where the results today, although still very imperfect, some people will still pretend like it’s awful and the worst thing they’ve ever seen. They refuse to admit the technology is at all impressive or making progress because they don’t like the technology.
I don’t like AI generated images and video either, but I can regrettably admit that the technology has gotten remarkably better over time.
I mean, these things can be tested. Maybe some people really are gifted at discerning AI work, and of course there's no accounting for taste. But the former is subject to objective evaluation, and the latter should at least be somewhat expressible.
I agree that there can be a tendency to conflate the two things: how advanced the technology is, and how aesthetically pleasing what it produces is. It's also important to remember that we're not obligated to like something just because it's "pretty" or has high aesthetic value in some abstract sense.
I'm having a little trouble understanding what you mean.
> I agree that there can be a tendency to conflate the two things: how advanced the technology is, and how aesthetically pleasing what it produces is. It's also important to remember that we're not obligated to like something just because it's "pretty" or has high aesthetic value in some abstract sense.
You're right that my problem is people conflating two things, but I have no issue with how people interpret the "aesthetic outputs" as you put it. The part I'm having trouble with is the obligation you imply, that we have to "like something just because it's 'pretty' or has high aesthetic value in some abstract sense."
I for one, think that LLM art looks terrible--the output is something I often dislike aesthetically. This is a matter of taste, and similar to the question of "do I like it and want to engage with it", you're free to make your own judgements here. There is no "right" or "wrong" answer with aesthetics.
However, with the questions of "do I like the technology" and "has the technology advanced", whereas one is similarly a matter of taste, the question of "has the technology advanced" is one that can be answered objectively. Of course it matters what your trying to measure, but take realism for example--something that AI image labs often try to perfect. The fact that the AI labs have gotten drastically better at generating realistic content is undeniable. While it's up to you if this matters, whether realism has advanced can objectively answered yes or no, without bringing taste into things.
I am making no claims here concerning the "high aesthetic value in some abstract sense". I don't think such an objective value of aesthetics exists. Does this clear things up?
Agreed. LLMs for writing is like intellectual catfishing. You are presenting yourself one way in written form.. but that's not who you will ever be once someone has to actually have a conversation with you. And that's wrong.
I agree with the gist of your sentiment, but I struggle with how to reconcile it with my use of these tools.
My use LLMs is precisely because I can never hope to express myself clearly. I have many fuzzy, disparate thoughts and it was a struggle to express them at all before this time in which I can do a long rambling voice transcription (absent of social pressures) and continue doing the same throughout the exploration and drafting processes. In my view, I give them a seed or a morbidly obese skeleton and LLMs take that into something a lot more coherent for myself and for others. I was passive before in my life, now I’m engaging. As two concrete examples: I never would have sent an email to my city regarding snow removal last winter when their failure to remove snow from the only sidewalk going over the interstate. I never would have pulled together my previous coursework and e-mails to send to my current professors in a petition for transfer-credit equivalency when it became clear that my deteriorating health would not allow me to finish the semester as-is. I never would have remembered all the concerns that I want to bring up at medical appointments. That is not to say these things were ever impossible, there are coping strategies available, and whatnot, but I’m in my late 30’s; I know what I did and not get done in the last 10 years, and “AI”-tooling/environments have helped me express my dreams and passions and concerns, etc., etc., etc. over the past years in a way that was simply not practically available to me, with a new capacity that I simply could not previously hope to match due to limited and fragmented time,attention, and energy. While I was hand-typing this on my keyboard, I could have instead been talking, reviewing, redrafting in spurts as I go about my morning, instead of a solid 45 minutes at max effort on my own part, as I did here (and I don’t feel that I conveyed myself half-as-well here as I could have achieved at much less cost to my energy, etc. by using an LLM). I do take offense when people do not review and vouch for things written on their behalf by LLMs.
How do we make room for their use as a cognitive-prosthesis (if you will allow such framing) without losing humane-ness?
Really? I seriously believe that people that think this way underestimate their self, especially if they're going to be sharing something valuable.
> How do we make room for their use as a cognitive-prosthesis (if you will allow such framing) without losing humane-ness?
As many others have expressed, we'd love to read the prompt (and the model's chain of thought if you have it). This scenario is like talking through a person translating things to each other, except from the recipient's perspective, the translator is absent from the conversation entirely.
Additionally, disclosing LLM usage is low hanging fruit to differentiate yourself from the 100x other people who "do not review and vouch for things written on their behalf by LLMs". If the LLM converted something unreadable whether due to a language barrier or incoherence to text relevant to people on the other end, and THEN they disregard it anyway, the fault is not on you for them dismissing the writing too early.
A lot of the stuff you wrote about is not what most of us are talking about when we call it intellectual catfishing or say your intellectual fly is open. For example, I have few problems with people using LLMs in private for purely personal things. I still won't go ahead and recommend it, but it's a decision we can all make for ourselves. Also, writing an email to your city is something you could ask your assistant to do if you were super rich, and using the LLM to do it isn't that different, so I'm not going to judge you for that.
As a more nuanced case, someone could dictate a long rambling stream of thoughts full of contradictions to an LLM to transcribe and summarize, and then they could reflect on the summary and write the real thing themselves. That's like talking to someone about a subject and writing about it afterwards, and also not something I would really take issue with.
That's my partial answer to the cognitive prosthesis question: keep it off to the side as a tool to help you do the work. There are still many caveats here, and the more complex the demands you make of the LLM, the greater the risk of some kind of break down. For example, continuing the example in the previous paragraph, if I did have the rambling conversation with an actual person who helped me refine and clarify my thoughts, I have some kind of mental model for the dialogue partner that can help me correct for some biases. With an LLM, anything resembling a mental model I could have would be very far off the mark, so I would need to be aware that I can't treat its output the same way I would treat something written by a person.
(By the way, for myself I have a stricter rule: I would only use an LLM in a way that made me a better person independently of the LLM and not dependent on the LLM, and thus I don't use them at all. That's what I actually recommend, but I don't expect everyone to adopt that rule.)
My main problem with having the LLM just do your writing is that it's simply a misrepresentation. It's wrong to claim you wrote something unless you chose the words. I really empathize with the struggle of expressing oneself clearly, but there's just no getting around this. And to be clear this isn't something pedantic or just a technicality, since the act of formulating a thought in an actual human language with valid syntax does require a level of care and attention that simply is not there unless you do it yourself.
Wow, you must be one very unique and special person if you converse the way you write. By definition, a carefully written and edited piece will be much more refined and cogent than an extemporaneous conversation.
Just watch an interview with a famous author. Or compare a legal brief to what court actually sounds like.
I've engaged with people at work where they led with an LLM via slack before I connected with them on a call. It's quite jarring and disappointing to see the gap in cohesion and knowledge going from one form of communication to the other.
If you're using an LLM to tidy something up, that's one thing. If the LLM is your voice and is supplanting your knowledge, I might as well cut you out and talk to the LLM directly.
I agree with the sentiment with a small caveat, since IMO good writers don't write the way that they talk. The very simple reason is that you can revise your writing but not your talking. But yeah, I completely agree that using an LLM to write your words is intellectual catfishing, and that's a great way to phrase it.
I'm in the process of writing a pretty long essay that has taken a few months. I've written the first draft, and I'm almost done with the second draft, which incurred substantial revisions. At the end of the process, maybe no sentence will be something I would actually utter in person, but the writing is still something I created, and as such, it is a representation of who I am as a person. Had I used an LLM to do any of the writing, that would no longer be the case, and the writing would at best represent me as a person when the LLM is at my side, and at worst (and most likely) not really represent me at all.
LLMs write better than most journalists. It also writes better than majority people in the world when it comes to English as majority are really bad in writing.
And of course, LLMs write as you prompt.
Personally, I'm happy to read broken English from non English people or good English from English people. But I'd rather read LLM writing than read typical long form perfect English journalist crap.
I would almost never transmit LLM output without a decent amount of editing. But I also don't understand people who paint it as this horrible offensive unreadable slop.
Calling it better than most journalists is extreme (and probably the reason for down votes), but it must certainly be better than the average person.
We're hearing this criticism from the highly educated professional class people who bother to have their own blog or otherwise spend their time talking about technology online. I mean come on.
To most people, the LLM must feel incredibly empowering, like us wearing a mecha suit. Would we always show restraint and only apply our newfound enhanced physical strength in carefully considered situations?
> But I also don't understand people who paint it as this horrible offensive unreadable slop.
When a piece of writing is full of LLM tells, I find it as offensive as any formulaic writing, except that the LLM style has quickly become pervasive, much more so than any other type of formulaic writing.
I’m not reacting out of some general dislike of LLMs - I use them daily. I’m reacting because I don’t like terrible writing.
Well said. When I realize I've been reading LLM filler and leave the page it's the same reaction I would have pre-2021 thinking I found a good source for something and realizing I'm actually reading blogspam.
The difference being this variant of blogspam is produced with basically zero cost and thus the infection has spread far beyond SEO into every UI surface with textbox. Plus there are now passionate defenders who insist finding their blogspam unpleasant to read is disrespectful or anti-progress somehow.
> But I'd rather read LLM writing than read typical long form perfect English journalist crap.
The problem is precisely that LLM writing is that exact thing (at least by default), but even more so. Longer-form, more "perfect" in some technical sense, and yet crappier.
I don't think anyone needs to disclose the tools they used to write something. Nobody ever disclosed Word's grammar suggestions or spelling corrections, or the fact that they used some autocomplete tool to produce code, so we should they now need to start disclosing this tool. Besides, in it's current state, it discloses itself to anyone paying attention.
I do think people own the output they produce regardless of the tools they use, and if they want to put crappy writing out there with their name on it, that's on them. Even if they do disclose that it was written by an LLM, they're still 100% responsible for the content.
I don't really care about the tool per se, but if I'm reading some LLM output you give me its utility is awfully limited if you don't also supply the prompt. That's what I'd like to see normalized:
Do not give me LLM output unless you also give me the full prompt text.
Without the prompt I cannot discern what you were trying to do, because the LLM output is basically devoid of any coherent voice. Whether it's code, prose, or pictures don't bother sending it to me unless you also include the prompt text.
it's often not a single prompt but a tree or rooted DAG of many prompts, with the root node being the final prompt. the prompts on interior nodes might not make much sense without the intermediate responses as well. how would you like this communicated?
>Do not give me LLM output unless you also give me the full prompt text.
Umm the point is you won't know to ask this question in the first place, and even if you did, you wouldn't have any leverage to demand this because you're a peasant.
Oh please, come on now. Grammar correction (which gets applied to text that you wrote) isn't comparable to LLM text generation. A tool assists a user in a task. LLMs don't assist you in writing: they do it all on their own. There's obviously a continuum here (at what point does a tool become so helpful that it ceases being a tool?), but I think I echo the general consensus.
> in it's current state, it discloses itself to anyone paying attention.
Well, unfortunately, I've still sunk a good bit of time into reading texts that I only realize to be AI-authored part way through. Plus, it's constantly being made harder to discern human-authorship.
> Nobody ever disclosed Word's grammar suggestions or spelling corrections
And plenty of people have made mistakes that clearly indicate mindlessly accepting such a "correction" when it was wrong (as opposed to just making a typo, or genuinely lacking skill in English, which both generally look different); and it's historically been common to poke fun at that.
> or the fact that they used some autocomplete tool to produce code
Right, because there are really only two options: either it's effectively guaranteed to be what the user would have written by hand anyway, or it's unambiguously wrong and does the wrong thing.
Not at all comparable to LLM prose.
> and if they want to put crappy writing out there with their name on it, that's on them.
The problem is that people who don't care (and quite possibly have no real sense for crappy writing) are vastly more enabled by the technology than people who do.
LLMs are bad at “writing” not in the technical sense, though I find their tone/prose unbearable.
LLMs are bad at “writing” in the sense of communicating and establishing ownership of the words. If someone pastes an LLM response to me it’s completely useless.
For example, I have a colleague who uses claude for all communication. Lately they respond to code review saying they’ve “filed a follow up”.
But what does that mean? Did claude write that because it sounded good? Did my coworker actually file a follow up? I have no clue! This method of communication is completely broken.
They definitionally cannot, for the definitions implied in the argument. The point is that good writing is a thing humans are capable of doing because they are human.
> It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't.
Yes. And this is a requirement of "good writing" as understood here.
> You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing.
That's not how i read the article. The author more-so claims that the proof of effort by a human was large part of the credibility to the writing; Proof that the author of the text has thought it through and come to their convulsions though effort and reflection, and spent effort articulating that into words they expect other humans to find insightful.
If i see LLM signs; did the author just rephrase with AI model or did a AI model content farm produce the whole post based on the prompt "write a inspiring linked-in post"?
Disclosure of LLM use is simply the author addressing the concern and building a case for why the article is worth reading.
I just feel like technology companies keep proving over and over that they are more than capable of forcing us into new behaviors regardless of our actual preferences. Once the domination is complete nobody will know what was lost in the process anyway.
'Without disclosure' is about taking credit for work that isn't yours.
WP defines 'ghostwriter' as: "a person hired to write literary or journalistic works, speeches, or other texts that are credited to another person as the author."
Anyone could choose to go through life relying on a reputation manufactured from many lies. They might want to think about how hard that reputation will hit the ground, if it does.
>I'm a bit skeptical of arguments of the form, "You should not use LLMs without disclosure because LLMs at bad at writing."
That’s not the argument. The argument is “LLM’s tend to write the same way all the time regardless of who prompted it.” You can't call it “your writing” if you’re using the same tool millions of others are using that boils your idea down to the same reduction as everyone else’s.
Use an LLM to assist? Cool, go ahead. Prompt, ctrl-c, ctrl-v? Go fuck yourself. I can’t be expected to put more effort into figuring out your take than you out into communicating your take to me.
When I log into LinkedIn, it seems like a vast majority of the posts are there to farm credibility and build a personal brand.
Pre LLMs, I found it all to be pretty gross. Post LLMs, my reaction to being on the receiving end of that is to find it pretty intellectually insulting.
There are ways in which using an LLM is branding suicide.
So much this. My average linkedin in exprience is a sprinkling of updates from people i personally know, in an oceon of inane "content" by ~$0 net worth people with 40 word self professed titles.
I am still baffled that microsoft is positioning that asset as a professional product. Imagine if bloomberg terminal landing page was a scrolling feed of aspiring influencer bullshit.
Or not. I mean, if you had no voice and nothing to say before, you can amplify that signal 10x now. Basically, you’re boosting your brand as a tasteless brainless schlub.
Your fly is also open when you indiscriminately fling accusations of LLM writing around. I know it isn't that easy to detect because I get falsely accused of it. To some people it seems to mean text written in complete sentences without glaring errors and maybe a few uncommon word choices. It has become an all purpose excuse for declining to engage with the meaning.
One of my neighbors sent a letter to the HOA president, who refused to even acknowledge it, on the grounds that it was written too well and so must have been AI assisted. I don't know if that was true, and don't much care, because I do know it contained valid issues that deserved a response.
The message of the post is what _should_ hopefully matter to a reader.
And, not the fact that it was written by an LLM.
I am a technical guy at heart; also an introverted extrovert. I hate writing docs that are to be written to satisfy someone else's metrics. For it to be a tickbox'ed item.
I delegate that to an LLM. I want to spend my time solving interesting challenges instead.
So, Mr. Cantrill, you got a problem with that? So be it.
> Please read past the LLM-ness of any given post. The message of the post is what _should_ hopefully matter to a reader. And, not the fact that it was written by an LLM.
No. I am interested in what a human has to say, not a clanker. If you don't wish to write that is fine, but don't hand it off to the slop machine and present it as though you did anything of value.
> Please read past the LLM-ness of any given post.
I just can't. LLM assisted posts are often so long, and the hints are usually obvious right at the start.
They're so unpleasant to read. "It's not X, it's Y" etc are bad because the comparisons rarely add anything at all to the message. It's filler that wastes my time. At that point I'd rather see your original prompt.
Why should I invest several minutes of my day reading something if I've already seen evidence that the author doesn't respect my time?
It's not that an LLM wrote it down much as the author couldn't be bothered to clean it up and remove the garbage cliches before publishing it.
Also in the author's latest post[0], they took this[1] self-reported preference poll seriously, which makes it very hard for me to take their articles seriously.
No, you explained why the selection bias doesn't matter, which I agree. The self-report data still is completely worthless in the first place though.
People are really, really good at lying to themselves, let alone to an online poll. They'll tell you that they prefer imperfect or even bad writing as long as it's not AI slop, just like how they'll tell you they like healthier food, they prioritize personality instead of look for potential date, how they use LLM "only as a spellchecker", and how they use tiktok for educational videos. As long as there is no stake, people will just say what make they feel better.
Self-reporting data for human behavior is just noise.
I mean, fine, it's anecdotal -- but the numbers are also overwhelming (and don't seem to disagree with the tenor here).
And look: you're obviously free to ignore me because you feel that the survey data is "completely worthless" and just slop your way to success -- all I'm doing is trying to explain why you shouldn't expect me (and people like me) to read what you create.
I worked at LinkedIn (briefly, before retirement) and the product had been useful to me for years before that, so I used it a fair bit but not much anymore since it doesn't serve any of my current needs. There were always awful million-view posts written by humans, useless influencers promoted by the algorithm. That was always garbage, but to an LLM those posts look like success, because engagement, so the LLM tries to replicate that garbage, does a mediocre job, and the result is this sort of weird garbage. Basically the LLM appears to be high on its own supply. Problem is the viral stuff was always what made me want to run out of the room and lock the door, so even if the LLMs did a better job of replicating that garbage, it would still be garbage, just a little less weird.
Part of it also with seeing the feed is that it is basically useless for me. The only interesting thing is when it automatically tells me someone I know got a new job someplace. All the rest is pure and I mean pure slop. No one I actually know ever posts anything to linked in. It would be like making a facebook status update these days. Like who does that, other than the influencer types of course?
The only place where I use AI for writing is to summarize press articles; this allows me to legally have a mirror of a press article I am commenting about in my blog (whenever I use AI, I make a disclaimer that the prose is AI-generated). Now that archive.org doesn’t mirror many press articles, and now that archive.today is having a lot of reliability problems (right now its CAPTCHA is down because it has gone beyond Google’s limit for CAPTCHA use), an AI summary of a news article (along with a link to the real article) is the only way to guarantee the reader will get this gist of the article I’m commenting on.
I also use AI to colorize old black and white pictures when discussing historical events in my blog, as well as the occasional AI enhancement of an old grainy and/or blurry photo.
So many people seem completely blind to LLM writing, they are fine sharing it on social media or at work. I think it’s people who are “not details people” and are used to judging something without reading it based on superficial cues which is what LLMs are optimized for.
And of course anyone who actually reads stuff is disgusted by it, so we quickly end up with a situation where content is piling up and nobody is consuming it which is basically dead internet theory.
On LinkedIn specifically I went from reading it regularly to almost never touching it, previously the nonsense (“the interviewer was the dog”) was still tolerable enough to flip through for updates and I found the platform useful for business leads. Now it’s just a feed of pure slop, when I do open it I just close again after reading a post is two when I remember how bad it is.
I think the most important line in this post is: But LLMs are also lousy writers and (most importantly!) they are not you.
When I was editing the Cloudflare blog I imposed very little in terms of style so that the style of each individual writer could come through. It was almost as important as the actual content that the reader could feel that an actual individual wrote the text (with all their personal quirks intact).
I published a magazine for ten years, and this was by far the hardest editing challenge we had; our authors were from all over the world, and some of them had to be pretty heavily edited because English was very much not their first language. Thankfully, we had really good editors who did a fantastic job of it… nothing would have killed us faster than a heavy-handed attempt at “normalizing” the content to a house style.
That said, context is also important. The vast majority of content of social media is of both low quality and marginal importance; style and character are important to make an impact, and AI is clearly not going to improve either.
On the other hand, functional communication, when the goal of the content is to simply pass information across and style is not as important, can, in my opinion, benefit from an AI polish, because so many people struggle with writing clearly. In those cases, I'd rather read slop I can understand than original content that is hard to parse, much like I'd rather read naïve code that you can easily follow than cleverly optimized code that is incomprehensible.
I'm not morally/philosophically opposed to someone generating text with AI. I just don't want to read something that isn't really "owned" by the person creating it (that is, the writer knows what he is sending me and endorses all of its contents), and because I can't discern that from people I don't know, I tend to view it with suspicion by default.
The HN title ("Intellectual Fly Is Open") made me think it's about some startup starting to sell subscriptions. That title should be de-editorialized. Was it LLM-generated?
Whenever I see a cringe post on LinkedIn, I medically block that person or mark that post as not interested. That’s the only way you can judge the algorithm not to show those posts
I can always tell when someone uses an LLM to write and never gave the LLM proper context on how to write (i.e., writing samples, skills files specific to writing, etc). These are also the people who tend to complain about AI's writing style.
You can get pretty good results if you take the time to tune it. Tropes and the like still sneak in but if you take the time to edit and rework things, it ends up being a pretty good workflow (especially for stuff that's more procedural, not artistic).
This feels like satire / parody. Praising LinkedIn. The text itself containing multiple LLM tells, especially in the parts complaining most about LLM writing.
Maybe not. Could just be kind of accidentally ironic with the author picking up LLM quirks from using them a lot.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 49.2 ms ] threadThey were likely hunting for a better job, chasing the thrill of a million views, or similar - seeking a side effect of writing, rather than seeking to help someone else understand what was in their head.
This style emerged from a large number of people explicitly preferring it over alternatives when offering feedback. There is genuinely no accounting for taste (and if there were, many people would be in crippling debt).
Who decide what is obvious or not?
If this is straight out of an LLM I am impressed
My reasoning is: If LLMs get better at writing—which I think is extremely likely—will you switch positions and say that now using LLMs without disclosure is A-OK?
Surely some people are willing to bite that bullet and say yes. But for most people, my guess is that the answer will remain no. Thus, I tend to think that the "real" reason most of us don't like it when people use LLMs to write without disclosure is that it's misleading: It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't.
(The em dashes in this message were rendered using keyboard shortcuts.)
There's also the problem that certain types of phrasing are perceived as effective, because they mark a pivotal point in the progress of the text and are, as such, used sparingly, but are now becoming everyday templates that incorporate whatever is available in the context. There is no way this passes the Turing test of a competent reader.
And there's yet another issue: in social research, there has been the concept of semantic position, indicated by deviation from the mean (or median). If you don't deviate from the mean, your semantic position is zero. There's simply no expression. In this sense, next token prediction really amounts to a desemantificiation of the context. There's really no sense in uttering any of these productions, no plausible motivation, other than for the purpose of raising you hand to be seen.
Every day I get more depressed thinking of what's happened to the supply of competent readers.
I would say it is certainly significantly more ok. There are two reasons reading AI-generated text sucks now:
1. It's usually low value and not trustworth - I could have just asked the AI myself.
2. The prose style is horrible to read.
If we eliminate the second reason then it's definitely an improvement. (Although on the other hand the terrible prose can be quite a helpful indication that you're wasting your time reading slop, so maybe we shouldn't complain about it!)
You have no way of knowing what the input to the writing was. You're making the erroneous assumption that the person posting the article was a mouthbreathing spammer who used the prompt "write me an article on subject XYZ, make no mistakes!" and you could have supplied the same prompt.
1. Facts and processes. I just want to know something. I do not care if some Nerds for Nginx article is AI written.
2. Opinions and experiences. I want to know a human is writing because emotionally engaging with an AI isn’t building a stronger society - it’s increasing isolation.
3. In another front, I feel like the value of an AI story cannot be greater than the value of the inputs. If you wrote a two paragraph prompt and an LLM produced a 10 page story, the truth is, it’s only worth two paragraphs. That’s just a feeling, but as of now I don’t think the LLMs have any additional life experiences to draw on to increase the value of their storytelling. (I understand this is debatable, but still- what they offer is available to everyone for now; it is a baseline.)
Readers are making this connection from their own experience. All these tells just to associate it with with garbage.
In the before times, sending a formal document full of typos and errors would show you didn't bother to proofread, now having a doc full of lazy "LLMisms" also looks like you were too lazy to proofread.
It's unreasonable to expect other people to suppress their intuitive heuristics formed from the bait and switch of being subjected to endless LLM spam every day and blame them for not giving you a fair chance.
They treat it as "just another tool" to improve efficiency. Like using a drill instead of a screwdriver.
Then there's people who are so lazy they give LLMs instructions like, "write a LinkedIn post about how AI is changing the future of work for thumbnail consultants." That's when it moves from "translating your thoughts" to "writing for you."
I think the issue is that it can be hard to tell the difference. We need better terms for these things so we can differentiate use cases.
Machine assisted versus machine delegated authorship?
Of course, with real books we do have the problem of ghostwriting, where an author willingly writes for a book that will be published under someone else's authorship. That may be where things end up here, with requirements to acknowledge sources, whether ghostwritten for you or written by others.
I might have smelled something suspicious before, but knowing for sure is worse.
LLMs seem already to be pretty good at translating, where you already have something fully written and are changing the language. It’s when they get rough ideas and fill in the gaps you get the empty prose they are known for.
Nonsense. I’m not sure whether this was ever an appropriate description of what LLMs do, but either way, they have obviously moved way, way beyond that.
I don’t like reading AI writing either but I’m sure that’s a transitory period. Single prompt text expansions are unlikely to be useful because they’re late-bindable. You could give the original to me and I might be able to understand better.
But a series of steering prompts with various sources brought in is a different story. At that point it’s just a question of whether the agent can put together good information and their current inability to do so is unlikely to mean an inherent problem.
Some kind of UI affordance for this might help: with the agent emitting tags that allow for auto-folding or expansion in a way that allows both concise text and exposition when required by the reader. Mechanical sympathy, but for code executing on a human: good old human sympathy if you will
Writing is a way humans communicate ideas. It's not the only way humans communicate ideas. And now, it's not only humans who communicate ideas, we just saw with the OpenAI HuggingFace hack how AI agents were able to communicate amongst themselves by using various hacked websites to opportunistically write notes for later agents to use.
All that "X is a thing only humans do" type of circular definitions will buy you, is to expand the definition of what humanity is. And I doubt that's really what you think.
Similarly if Joe's contribution to his long form "idea" is a couple of bullet points, a programme trained on flowery phrasing and a weighted average of everyone else's ideas isn't communicating Joe's thoughts on the topic, it's just adding words.
The debate on whether Claude actually thinks or not is orthogonal to the fact that outsourcing your "thought leadership" to it is avoiding thinking or leading. If I want to know how Wikipedia or Claude summarise wider human thought about the topic, I can find their websites thanks
And nor is an LLM generating text just "copy/pasting a Wikipedia article", you'd think people on HN would be smarter than that at least.
If all Joe Smith is going to do is cat $(which claude) to his LinkedIn, then he'll deserve the poor results he gets from it, but we shouldn't mistakenly say that this will be because LLMs simply cannot write. It would be just as dumb for Joe Smith to do with with a professional human ghostwriter.
I often use LLMs to translate from "shitty English" to "good English". The substance remains the same but it's nicer to read.
If LLM writing improves to the point where they can infer the business (or other real world) context and serves the functional purpose of informing others as opposed to being an intellectually lazy piece being produced only for the purpose of being produced, then I’d be fine. It’s likely the author would need to spend some effort on the said piece of writing.
Someone's actual writing (or talking) is a rich stream of information about who they are, their motives, their preferences, modes of persuasion, and so much more. Undetectable LLM writing essentially allows someone to assume another person's identity. That is not good for anyone except the person trying to pull off a "scam" of some sort, in the broadest sense of that term. It's bad for everyone else, and for society at large.
The worst of this is with image/video AI models, where the results today, although still very imperfect, some people will still pretend like it’s awful and the worst thing they’ve ever seen. They refuse to admit the technology is at all impressive or making progress because they don’t like the technology.
I don’t like AI generated images and video either, but I can regrettably admit that the technology has gotten remarkably better over time.
In other words, the three questions of:
- is the technology good?
- does it produce aesthetically good outputs?
- do I like it and want to engage with it?
are all pretty independent.
I for one, think that LLM art looks terrible--the output is something I often dislike aesthetically. This is a matter of taste, and similar to the question of "do I like it and want to engage with it", you're free to make your own judgements here. There is no "right" or "wrong" answer with aesthetics.
However, with the questions of "do I like the technology" and "has the technology advanced", whereas one is similarly a matter of taste, the question of "has the technology advanced" is one that can be answered objectively. Of course it matters what your trying to measure, but take realism for example--something that AI image labs often try to perfect. The fact that the AI labs have gotten drastically better at generating realistic content is undeniable. While it's up to you if this matters, whether realism has advanced can objectively answered yes or no, without bringing taste into things.
I am making no claims here concerning the "high aesthetic value in some abstract sense". I don't think such an objective value of aesthetics exists. Does this clear things up?
How do we make room for their use as a cognitive-prosthesis (if you will allow such framing) without losing humane-ness?
Really? I seriously believe that people that think this way underestimate their self, especially if they're going to be sharing something valuable.
> How do we make room for their use as a cognitive-prosthesis (if you will allow such framing) without losing humane-ness? As many others have expressed, we'd love to read the prompt (and the model's chain of thought if you have it). This scenario is like talking through a person translating things to each other, except from the recipient's perspective, the translator is absent from the conversation entirely.
Additionally, disclosing LLM usage is low hanging fruit to differentiate yourself from the 100x other people who "do not review and vouch for things written on their behalf by LLMs". If the LLM converted something unreadable whether due to a language barrier or incoherence to text relevant to people on the other end, and THEN they disregard it anyway, the fault is not on you for them dismissing the writing too early.
As a more nuanced case, someone could dictate a long rambling stream of thoughts full of contradictions to an LLM to transcribe and summarize, and then they could reflect on the summary and write the real thing themselves. That's like talking to someone about a subject and writing about it afterwards, and also not something I would really take issue with.
That's my partial answer to the cognitive prosthesis question: keep it off to the side as a tool to help you do the work. There are still many caveats here, and the more complex the demands you make of the LLM, the greater the risk of some kind of break down. For example, continuing the example in the previous paragraph, if I did have the rambling conversation with an actual person who helped me refine and clarify my thoughts, I have some kind of mental model for the dialogue partner that can help me correct for some biases. With an LLM, anything resembling a mental model I could have would be very far off the mark, so I would need to be aware that I can't treat its output the same way I would treat something written by a person.
(By the way, for myself I have a stricter rule: I would only use an LLM in a way that made me a better person independently of the LLM and not dependent on the LLM, and thus I don't use them at all. That's what I actually recommend, but I don't expect everyone to adopt that rule.)
My main problem with having the LLM just do your writing is that it's simply a misrepresentation. It's wrong to claim you wrote something unless you chose the words. I really empathize with the struggle of expressing oneself clearly, but there's just no getting around this. And to be clear this isn't something pedantic or just a technicality, since the act of formulating a thought in an actual human language with valid syntax does require a level of care and attention that simply is not there unless you do it yourself.
Just watch an interview with a famous author. Or compare a legal brief to what court actually sounds like.
If you're using an LLM to tidy something up, that's one thing. If the LLM is your voice and is supplanting your knowledge, I might as well cut you out and talk to the LLM directly.
More like:
"So connecting with them was an error"
Which I think you understand, but are choosing to be facetious.
I'm in the process of writing a pretty long essay that has taken a few months. I've written the first draft, and I'm almost done with the second draft, which incurred substantial revisions. At the end of the process, maybe no sentence will be something I would actually utter in person, but the writing is still something I created, and as such, it is a representation of who I am as a person. Had I used an LLM to do any of the writing, that would no longer be the case, and the writing would at best represent me as a person when the LLM is at my side, and at worst (and most likely) not really represent me at all.
And of course, LLMs write as you prompt.
Personally, I'm happy to read broken English from non English people or good English from English people. But I'd rather read LLM writing than read typical long form perfect English journalist crap.
Calling it better than most journalists is extreme (and probably the reason for down votes), but it must certainly be better than the average person.
We're hearing this criticism from the highly educated professional class people who bother to have their own blog or otherwise spend their time talking about technology online. I mean come on.
To most people, the LLM must feel incredibly empowering, like us wearing a mecha suit. Would we always show restraint and only apply our newfound enhanced physical strength in carefully considered situations?
When a piece of writing is full of LLM tells, I find it as offensive as any formulaic writing, except that the LLM style has quickly become pervasive, much more so than any other type of formulaic writing.
I’m not reacting out of some general dislike of LLMs - I use them daily. I’m reacting because I don’t like terrible writing.
The difference being this variant of blogspam is produced with basically zero cost and thus the infection has spread far beyond SEO into every UI surface with textbox. Plus there are now passionate defenders who insist finding their blogspam unpleasant to read is disrespectful or anti-progress somehow.
The problem is precisely that LLM writing is that exact thing (at least by default), but even more so. Longer-form, more "perfect" in some technical sense, and yet crappier.
and you can always just ask to be concise.
I do think people own the output they produce regardless of the tools they use, and if they want to put crappy writing out there with their name on it, that's on them. Even if they do disclose that it was written by an LLM, they're still 100% responsible for the content.
Umm the point is you won't know to ask this question in the first place, and even if you did, you wouldn't have any leverage to demand this because you're a peasant.
> in it's current state, it discloses itself to anyone paying attention.
Well, unfortunately, I've still sunk a good bit of time into reading texts that I only realize to be AI-authored part way through. Plus, it's constantly being made harder to discern human-authorship.
And plenty of people have made mistakes that clearly indicate mindlessly accepting such a "correction" when it was wrong (as opposed to just making a typo, or genuinely lacking skill in English, which both generally look different); and it's historically been common to poke fun at that.
> or the fact that they used some autocomplete tool to produce code
Right, because there are really only two options: either it's effectively guaranteed to be what the user would have written by hand anyway, or it's unambiguously wrong and does the wrong thing.
Not at all comparable to LLM prose.
> and if they want to put crappy writing out there with their name on it, that's on them.
The problem is that people who don't care (and quite possibly have no real sense for crappy writing) are vastly more enabled by the technology than people who do.
LLMs are bad at “writing” in the sense of communicating and establishing ownership of the words. If someone pastes an LLM response to me it’s completely useless.
For example, I have a colleague who uses claude for all communication. Lately they respond to code review saying they’ve “filed a follow up”.
But what does that mean? Did claude write that because it sounded good? Did my coworker actually file a follow up? I have no clue! This method of communication is completely broken.
They definitionally cannot, for the definitions implied in the argument. The point is that good writing is a thing humans are capable of doing because they are human.
> It's a sort of a claim that certain thoughts can be attributed to a human being when in fact they can't.
Yes. And this is a requirement of "good writing" as understood here.
That's not how i read the article. The author more-so claims that the proof of effort by a human was large part of the credibility to the writing; Proof that the author of the text has thought it through and come to their convulsions though effort and reflection, and spent effort articulating that into words they expect other humans to find insightful.
If i see LLM signs; did the author just rephrase with AI model or did a AI model content farm produce the whole post based on the prompt "write a inspiring linked-in post"?
Disclosure of LLM use is simply the author addressing the concern and building a case for why the article is worth reading.
'Without disclosure' is about taking credit for work that isn't yours.
WP defines 'ghostwriter' as: "a person hired to write literary or journalistic works, speeches, or other texts that are credited to another person as the author."
Anyone could choose to go through life relying on a reputation manufactured from many lies. They might want to think about how hard that reputation will hit the ground, if it does.
That’s not the argument. The argument is “LLM’s tend to write the same way all the time regardless of who prompted it.” You can't call it “your writing” if you’re using the same tool millions of others are using that boils your idea down to the same reduction as everyone else’s.
Use an LLM to assist? Cool, go ahead. Prompt, ctrl-c, ctrl-v? Go fuck yourself. I can’t be expected to put more effort into figuring out your take than you out into communicating your take to me.
Pre LLMs, I found it all to be pretty gross. Post LLMs, my reaction to being on the receiving end of that is to find it pretty intellectually insulting.
There are ways in which using an LLM is branding suicide.
I am still baffled that microsoft is positioning that asset as a professional product. Imagine if bloomberg terminal landing page was a scrolling feed of aspiring influencer bullshit.
Or not. I mean, if you had no voice and nothing to say before, you can amplify that signal 10x now. Basically, you’re boosting your brand as a tasteless brainless schlub.
> Your intellectual fly is open
which makes more sense.
Your title made think that a software project was open sourced or something.
One of my neighbors sent a letter to the HOA president, who refused to even acknowledge it, on the grounds that it was written too well and so must have been AI assisted. I don't know if that was true, and don't much care, because I do know it contained valid issues that deserved a response.
The message of the post is what _should_ hopefully matter to a reader.
And, not the fact that it was written by an LLM.
I am a technical guy at heart; also an introverted extrovert. I hate writing docs that are to be written to satisfy someone else's metrics. For it to be a tickbox'ed item.
I delegate that to an LLM. I want to spend my time solving interesting challenges instead.
So, Mr. Cantrill, you got a problem with that? So be it.
No. I am interested in what a human has to say, not a clanker. If you don't wish to write that is fine, but don't hand it off to the slop machine and present it as though you did anything of value.
I just can't. LLM assisted posts are often so long, and the hints are usually obvious right at the start.
They're so unpleasant to read. "It's not X, it's Y" etc are bad because the comparisons rarely add anything at all to the message. It's filler that wastes my time. At that point I'd rather see your original prompt.
Why should I invest several minutes of my day reading something if I've already seen evidence that the author doesn't respect my time?
It's not that an LLM wrote it down much as the author couldn't be bothered to clean it up and remove the garbage cliches before publishing it.
Also in the author's latest post[0], they took this[1] self-reported preference poll seriously, which makes it very hard for me to take their articles seriously.
[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re...
[1] https://writethatblog.substack.com/p/dev-reaction-to-ai-blog...
People are really, really good at lying to themselves, let alone to an online poll. They'll tell you that they prefer imperfect or even bad writing as long as it's not AI slop, just like how they'll tell you they like healthier food, they prioritize personality instead of look for potential date, how they use LLM "only as a spellchecker", and how they use tiktok for educational videos. As long as there is no stake, people will just say what make they feel better.
Self-reporting data for human behavior is just noise.
And look: you're obviously free to ignore me because you feel that the survey data is "completely worthless" and just slop your way to success -- all I'm doing is trying to explain why you shouldn't expect me (and people like me) to read what you create.
Well, no; they looked like success to the people doing the RLHF.
I also use AI to colorize old black and white pictures when discussing historical events in my blog, as well as the occasional AI enhancement of an old grainy and/or blurry photo.
And of course anyone who actually reads stuff is disgusted by it, so we quickly end up with a situation where content is piling up and nobody is consuming it which is basically dead internet theory.
On LinkedIn specifically I went from reading it regularly to almost never touching it, previously the nonsense (“the interviewer was the dog”) was still tolerable enough to flip through for updates and I found the platform useful for business leads. Now it’s just a feed of pure slop, when I do open it I just close again after reading a post is two when I remember how bad it is.
When I was editing the Cloudflare blog I imposed very little in terms of style so that the style of each individual writer could come through. It was almost as important as the actual content that the reader could feel that an actual individual wrote the text (with all their personal quirks intact).
That said, context is also important. The vast majority of content of social media is of both low quality and marginal importance; style and character are important to make an impact, and AI is clearly not going to improve either.
On the other hand, functional communication, when the goal of the content is to simply pass information across and style is not as important, can, in my opinion, benefit from an AI polish, because so many people struggle with writing clearly. In those cases, I'd rather read slop I can understand than original content that is hard to parse, much like I'd rather read naïve code that you can easily follow than cleverly optimized code that is incomprehensible.
Unless I'm directly interacting with the LLM, someone should endorse the content.
You can get pretty good results if you take the time to tune it. Tropes and the like still sneak in but if you take the time to edit and rework things, it ends up being a pretty good workflow (especially for stuff that's more procedural, not artistic).
What? No, the complaints come from the people who end up expected to read the result.
Maybe not. Could just be kind of accidentally ironic with the author picking up LLM quirks from using them a lot.
Funny in either case.
I mean, i check it to see if a recruiter has something interesting but otherwise?